UBI and JG both antiblack

The checkered history of past efforts to alleviate poverty and economic inequality reveals the difficulty of decoupling subsistence-level benefits from politically popular work mandates. Under current workfare programs funded by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), compulsory work requirements subject recipients to punitive sanctions for noncompliance—no matter how inappropriate or degrading the assigned work—that reduce subsistence benefits despite demonstrated need.49 Government assistance has thus been formally recast through workfare, not as a justly deserved entitlement but rather as a condition to be excused solely in extreme circumstances.50 Hence the Trump Administration openly characterized poverty as laziness—an immoral failure of will—and expanded work requirements beyond cash assistance by requiring recipients of government aid to work off their “debt” for access to medical assistance, nutritious food, and safe housing.51 At the same time, national tax and spending policies have consistently— both in intent and impact—favored the breadwinning-white-male-headed household over that of the unmarried single mother of color. Such incentives encourage patriarchal patterns of economic dependency that exacerbate disparate racial and gender impacts in income inequality, wealth building, and economic mobility.52 Even if not explicitly supporting disparate treatment by race, sociologists suggest that “perceptions of rising minority power, declines in whites’ relative socioeconomic status, or other perceived macro-level threats to whites’ racial status may provoke adoption of more restrictive welfare regimes.”53 As a result, cash assistance programs associated with greater uptake by people of color carry the harshest and most punitive or onerous requirements.54 “As whites attempt to undermine racial progress they see as threatening their group’s status, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups.”55 Past experiences with welfare and workfare reform since the New Deal era reveal persistent discrimination and disparate impact in both the conception and execution of safety net assistance and job creation programs. First, as historians have described, the design and implementation of New Deal programs, both by intent and in effect, reproduced existing social disparities that excluded Black workers and women of color from program benefits.56 Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) were explicitly and intentionally designed to exclude agricultural and domestic workers—primarily Blacks in states governed by southern democrats—from benefits and protections,57 an injustice also effectuated by TANF’s predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and later by the GI Bill, as implemented at the discretion of state agency employees.58 Federal New Deal programs intended to provide a social safety net after the Great Depression provided paid, public-works jobs primarily to ablebodied men (for example, through the Works Progress Administration (WPA)) while also expanding means-tested cash assistance to households with dependent children regardless of adult employment status through AFDC.59 Although these programs varied greatly in implementation from state to state, one aspect was consistent: Blacks were excluded from the highest paying jobs and benefit amounts.60 As economist Nancy Rose recounts, the WPA and other New Deal work programs were successful on a number of levels but still fell victim to opposition from employers who objected to the wages as too high, the work as unproductive, and the workers as displacing the private labor force.61 Left to the discretion of local agency supervisors, job placements revealed supervisors’ preferences for enrolling older male heads of household in each family’s WPA slot and reproduced existing social disparities by, for example, favoring more privileged workers for white-collar, professional jobs.62 To appease southern legislators, WPA rolls were closed during certain seasons to maintain a ready supply of cheap domestic and agricultural workers—who were disproportionately Black63—as private employers sought agricultural laborers for low-paid farm work.64 Finally, WPA workers were prohibited from refusing jobs offered by private employers.65 While Black workers remained excluded from the benefits of social safety net programs, unmarried women faced a double bind: segregation in the labor market and increasingly punitive safety net programs.66 By the mid-1960s, as the War on Poverty continued to rage, racist stereotypes and public perceptions of welfare dependency as a disincentive to engage in low-wage work demonized Black single mothers67 and derailed attempts to create a federal Family Assistance Program (FAP), which would pay a minimum amount of cash assistance without a work requirement to households with children.68 Instead, the Earned Income Tax Credit was born to incentivize paid work through a tax credit conditioned on receipt of earned income and effectively meaningful only to households with dependent children.69 As sociologist Brian Steensland argues in his careful account of the rise and demise of FAP, ideology and culture played a decisive role in ending FAP’s chances of passage, as public depictions of the program increasingly framed it as a non-reciprocal payment with no expected social contribution in return.70 Coupled with the National Welfare Rights Organization’s opposition to the proposed reduction of benefit levels in northern regions of the country, and in response to pilot experiments reporting higher divorce rates correlating with mothers’ reduced economic dependence on men,71 FAP was eventually overshadowed by calls for an Earned Income Tax Credit and a later abandoned JG.72 Rose’s comprehensive history beginning with temporary New Deal job creation programs and continuing through 1990s welfare reform highlights numerous concerns that repeatedly threatened to impede progress, including fears of corruption, displacement of private employees, make-work jobs, and illegal discrimination due to discretionary local job assignment practices.73 Writing before TANF imposed even harsher work requirements as a condition of receiving public benefits, Rose called for expansion of voluntary work incentive programs (fair work rather than workfare) in order to increase labor market participation and job readiness for those left out of economic prosperity or structurally unemployed.74 Based on her extensive analysis of New Deal WPA programs, Rose identified several challenges that could have been addressed by a genuine JG program but that were instead exacerbated by the TANF program’s punitive mandatory work requirements.75 To avoid similar problems in a JG and safety net program, Rose advised that such schemes should adhere to nondiscrimination and other labor protections, be locally driven, be administered by nongovernmental organizations, and preserve worker dignity and choice—for example by preserving the choice to combine paid work with caregiving or postsecondary education.76 Similarly, around the time that welfare reform was seriously being debated, the late Anthony Atkinson proposed “participatory income” as a compromise—offering a basic income to all individuals conditioned upon participation in a broadly defined range of socially useful activities—which he later promoted as a substitute for the existing safety net.77 Even this kinder, gentler version of workfare retained the problematic aspects of a restrictive mandatory system. Instead, in 1996, the TANF program enacted a punitive workfare scheme that intensified the worst features of the WPA by imposing mandatory work requirements as a condition of receiving subsistence-level benefits.78 With the racialized association of poverty with Black women cemented in the public mind through the false image of a welfare queen living on taxpayer funds,79 TANF imposed lifetime limits on the receipt of federal cash assistance and conditioned receipt on participation in work requirements.80 Consequently, states dependent on federal funds were required to implement punitive work programs.